Fallout Shelter Review

Bethesda released Fallout Shelter earlier this week. The game is a free-to-play title that’s set in the world of Fallout, and you take the role of Vault Overseer, who’s in charge of a fallout vault, and the safety and needs of everyone in it.

The game begins with you building your very own vault from the scratch. The game offers very helpful tutorials of how to do it, and you’re required to build a power source, water treatment plant, and a cafeteria to start the game. Then, dwellers will start to show up seeking a spot in your vault. You can then assign the dwellers to certain jobs, and over the time, you will earn resources, or caps to upgrade the rooms. The game also gives you the ability to place a male and female in the living quarters, with a chance to create a children. Or, you can ship dwellers out to scout wastelands off-screen with potential to bring back more resources. The game is very similar to most mobile games, as you just build, wait, click, and collect.

Unlike most mobile games though, the game actually forces you to keep up with your resources. If you don’t go back to the game as often as possible, the resources will actually go down drastically, and along with it the mood of your dwellers. It’s actually really hard to keep your dwellers happy, as no matter how hard I try to keep the resources coming, my people’s happiness stay low. Also, every once in a while, raider will attack your vault, and you must make sure your people are equipped and ready to face off the enemies. It’s satisfying to see your people kill off the invaders, but it’s also terrifying to see the pregnant women and children being chased off by the enemies.

For a free-to-play game, the game really doesn’t require you to make additional purchases at all. The game features the option to rush resources to completion, but it’s not rush with purchases at all! In fact, the game allows you to rush the activities simply by taking a possible chance of failure. If you failed, the room might explode, caught on fire, killing a citizen, or causing a breach. The consequences can be grand, but it’s a fun to take a risk and see what would happen.

And of course, there are optional microtransactions too. It will buy you lunchboxes for $0.99 a piece, all the way to $19.99 for 40 boxes. Each box will give you four Shelter Cards with rare items to improve your gameplay experience. A wide range of items too, such as outfits, weapons, caps, resources, or even very skillful dwellers all can be found in lunchboxes. It makes the game so much easier to play, and the temptation is there.

The best part of the game is its visual. The cartoony art style is great, and it’s even better when you can double click on a room, zooms into it and sees what the dwellers are doing or even thinking at the moment. It’s a good touch, and it further allows players to care about the dwellers’ happiness.

Fallout Shelter is a fun game. It’s simple, straight to the point, and something easy to play before Fallout 4 release in November. However, for a click and wait game, the game is really demanding, and the states drop quickly. Most of this type a game takes hours, or even days away to have negative consequences, but this game requires players to attend it every few minutes. Hopefully an update can release sometime in near future to fix the issue. Regardless, this is still a good enough game that I’m willing to keep on my limited space device.